The topical application of liquid compositions to the surfaces of both animate and inanimate objects to effect a desired change involve the processes of controlling wetting, spreading, flow, leveling, foaming, detergency, and the like. In recent years, there has been a move to waterborne coatings in place of solvent borne coatings from the viewpoints of resource savings and environmental pollution. For example, waterborne coatings have been investigated for primer coatings, base coatings and top coatings for automobiles. This allows flow-and-leveling agents for waterborne coatings having higher functionality to be required. In order to meet this requirement, acryl base polymers, modified silicone oils and the like have so far been used as flow-and-leveling agents. However, a satisfactory wetting, flow-and-leveling property and an improvement in coating defects are not necessarily achieved with these conventional techniques in the fields requiring a high level of appearance for uses such as automobiles which have been researched in recent years. So either large concentrations of organic surfactants or specialty perfluoroalkyl functionalized surfactants with very low surface tension are added in order to obtain a good appearance. One of the issues with using very high concentrations of organic surfactants is the adverse effects that exerted on other properties of coatings such as layer-to-layer adhesive property in recoating or roughening the surfaces of the recoated films.
Conventional organic surfactants provide only an inadequate solution to the leveling problem in the case of coatings, and there is an urgent need for new surfactants which make it possible to produce absolutely smooth coating films. Alternatively, the specialty fluoro based surfactants are facing pressures from toxicological and bioaccumulation fronts. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing to tighten regulation of such perfluoroalkyl materials that have the potential of braking down into toxic perfluoroalkyl carboxylates, such as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), and perfluoroalkyl sulfonates, including perfluorooctanyl sulfonate (PFOS). These substances are expected to bioaccumulate, persist in the environment, and are likely to be “highly toxic”. Also, studies suggest that perfluoroalkyl sulfonates and carboxylates may get released in the air when items made with certain fluoropolymers are burned in municipal waste incinerators
Accordingly, the identification of non-fluorinated surfactants that can avoid environmental and healthconcerns is of interest. The present invention also describes the utility and application of this novel fluorine free surfactant compositions to provide improved flow, leveling and wetting benefits.